Re: Not phonetic but ___???

And Rosta scripsit:

> The problem is how to choose which distinctions to blur. Consider
> THOUGHT, GOAT, FORCE, NORTH, CURE: collapsing all 5 into one would
> result in too many homographs, but any partial collapse into fewer
> than 5 is going to run contrary to one accent or another.
I think that FORCE vs. NORTH is clearly dying out in this country,
though I don't know the situation in the U.K.

> The usual answer is to ignore the accents of the speakers most ignored
> or looked down on by everybody else, and to give priority to the
> accents of the rich and powerful.
Indeed.  I've always been a fan of merging FOOT and GOOSE; even though
they're distinct in almost all accents, the functional load is very
low and there are a huge number of idiosyncratically pronounced words.

--
John Cowan                              <jcowan@...>
http://www.reutershealth.com            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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